Winning the War - 'Til Tuesday

‘Til Tuesday’ seems to get doubly blasted by people with opinions on pop music. First, they were supposedly one hit wonders on the success of their 1985 monster hit single Voices Carry, but were otherwise one of the many forgettable light-weight pop bands that were around seemingly briefly (at least on radio). Second, fans of Aimee Mann’s later solo work tend to dismiss the band for many of the same reasons a lot of 80s music got dismissed: too poppy, too much synthesizer, etc.

I couldn’t disagree with both of these opinions more. Voices Carry is a nice pop song, the song that initially attracted me to the band. But the band is way way more than that song. In fact, I would argue that VC is one of their least interesting songs (I have the same argument with Men Without Hats and The Safety Dance, and the Cars’ album Heartbeat City: the non hit songs are the best). I am not well versed in Mann’s work. It’s on my list of stuff to check out eventually. But you absolutely cannot do better songwriting than 'Til Tuesday, particularly their first album. As to the instrumentation, the keyboard driven sounds of the 80s have never gotten much respect from the rock world. But to my ear, the best music combines keyboard and guitar sounds seamlessly. 'Til Tuesday did that (as did a lot of rock in the late 70s/early 80s, in particular Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who made their best music, in my opinion, during this period). I am a keyboardist, and therefore biased, so take that with however many grains of salt you like.

It was really hard to pick a song from the Voices Carry album to blog about, but I chose Winning the War, because it has maybe some of the most unexpected elements for a pop song. (The other really really great unheralded songs on this album I would recommend checking out are: I Could Get Used to This, You Know the Rest, Are You Serious?, and Don’t Watch Me Bleed, but really the whole album is excellent. Sadly, I can’t find Youtube videos for any of these songs.)

The song (lyrics here) starts out with a big guitar blast into a upper midtempo groovy intro guitar riff. Then the guitar plays the vocal line of the verse second part of the intro, still guitar driven. The blasts begin each verse line, and the rhythmic line builds into the first verse. Aimee’s sweet high vocals with her quirky phrasing match the instrumental backing of the verses. And the chorus is withheld, like a good pop song should do. There's nice minimalism in these verses, just clean drums with light bouncy bass, midrange groaning guitar, and Aimee's earnest, sugary soprano. Then we hit the first chorus, which is actually bridge like, the vocal line is "winning the war" but it's delivered in a lower register, more furtive than the verse vocals. This element is played twice. The real chorus comes after this, in which a different phrasing contains “I know…. You know… Winning the war’s….not…. Winning at all.” High, with nice harmony (also by Aimee?). This is again over a catchy and seamless fusion of guitar and synthesizer. The bass line of this part changes after two cycles. First, it is specialized to this part, but then it goes back to the bass line of the first chorus flavor, which gives it a funky continuation for the repetition of the chorus message. Finally, the faster high harmonic “Winning the war" vocal is continued with the slower solo “Winning the war” vocal of the first chorus part, with some vamping as the song fades. It’s a short song with a simple but yet sophisticated construction. For a band’s first album, this reflects some very nice crafting. There are instances of this throughout the other two 'Til Tuesday albums ( Welcome Home [1986] and Everything’s Different Now [1988]). I look forward to studying Mann’s solo stuff for similar elements, but I wanted to emphasize here how I feel that 'Til Tuesday has largely gone unappreciated and overlooked. I for one was hugely influenced by this music.